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's Eric Schmidt has taken to the airwaves over here in the UK to talk about the company's payment (or, to taste, non-payment) of taxes. And he's gone straight to the heart of the matter too: there's no point in politicians complaining about the tax system when it's those very politicians who pass the laws that make up the tax system:

Mr Schmidt said it was up to the government to change its tax system if it wanted companies to pay more taxes.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week, he said: "What we are doing is legal. I'm rather perplexed by this debate, which has been going in the UK for some time, because I view taxes as not optional.

"I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required. It's not a debate. You pay the taxes.

"If the British system changes the tax laws, then we will comply. If the taxes go up, we will pay more, if they go down, we will pay less. That is a political decision for the democracy that is the United Kingdom."

All of which is obviously and entirely true.

Currently the law states, quite clearly and quite simply, that you can sell into all 27 European Union countries while having only one corporate form in one of those 27 countries. This was also quite deliberate from those who set up the system. They knew that tax competition keeps tax rates low. And given that corporation tax is one of the worst taxes we can have (it has higher deadweight costs that other methods of raising income, kills off more economic activity per £ of revenue raised) then it's a very good idea indeed that we have tax competition to make sure that the rates stay low.

And that's exactly what Google does. It sells into all EU countries through its office and company in Ireland. It is not only obeying the law as it is it's doing precisely what those who wrote the law intended. Taking advantage of tax competition and in doing so keeping those corporate tax rates low in other places.

Further, as Schmidt says, if politicians want the law to be different then those politicians are the ones sitting in the legislatures where the laws are made. So they should get on with it rather than whining about the current situation.

My own view is, as I've stated many times, that corporation tax only exists because corporations are a convenient place to get the cash from. The actual economic burden falls on people, either as workers or shareholders. Now that globalisation has made corporations not a convenient place to try and get money from we should simply abandon that system: just tax the shareholders and the workers instead.

Even if you disagree with that idea though, it's still obviously true that it's the politicians who make the laws so if they don't like the laws as they are it is incumbent on them to get on with changing them.